Carleton professor emeritus Donald Andrew Dawson was inducted as a fellow of the Royal Society of London Oct. 7.
Dawson, 73, taught at the Carleton school of mathematics and statistics in the 1970s, and said he received the news of his nomination in May.
Before he was nominated, Dawson served as president of the Bernoulli Society, director of the Fields Institute, and as a member of the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council International Review of UK Mathematics. According to Dawson, the selection process was very difficult.
“There is a very long process . . . it passes for more than one committee that goes through the several nominees and then selects a final list,” he said.
Though the Royal Society looks through the life contribution of nominees, Dawson said his most significant work was the Dawson-Watanabe superprocess. He said he thinks it was this work that got him nominated to the elite group of only 1,314 scholars worldwide.
“The superprocess . . . expanding from functions that work in single systems to systems that work in both space and time, describes the development of a population, which has this random component, in both space and time,” Dawson said.
The research is based on discoveries from the late 1800s, when it was determined that “many phenomena in the biological world had a random component, for example the number of offspring of a certain population,” he said.
Since it models random fluctuations over space and time, the process can also be applied to many other issues, such as calculating if an epidemic will grow or die out, or the financial risks of an investment.
Dawson has received the Carleton University Research Achievement Award, Max Planck Research Award for International Cooperation, CRM-Fields Institute Prize and the gold medal of the Statistical Society of Canada.
-with files from David Meffe